In 1956, a group of younger Brazilian artists principally the poets Augusto de Campos,
his brother Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari, the editors of the avant-garde
magazine Noigandresused the setting of an exposition at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo to
declare themselves to constitute a movement: Poesia
Concreta (in English, "Concrete Poetry" [CP]).
The 1956 event was the antitype of the Semana de Arte
Moderna ("Modern Art Week") of 1922, in
which Oswald de Andrade, Heitor Villa-Lobos, Mário de Andrade, and other founders of
Brazilian modernismo had announced an aesthetic program cognate with French and Italian
modernismsand which was to tend, in 1928, to the proclamation of a new movement, "anthropophagy," as
a deconstruction of Brazil's colonial matrix, "the critical ingestion of European culture and the
reworking of that tradition in Brazilian
terms."1 The aims of the
concretistas in the 1950s were to reclaim the origins of Brazilian modernism in the decisive events of the twenties, and to reassert its
international prospects; they proposed to overturn the neoclassical certainties of the so-called
"Generation of '45" and to install Mallarmé's
Un Coup de Dés, Joyce's Finnegans
Wake, and the lyrics of Pound, Cummings, and Mayakovsky as the regnant international influences on Brazilian poetry
and poetics.

The principal collections of Augusto de Campos's poetry are
VIVA VAIA: Poesia 1949-1979, which was issued in a second edition by the publisher Brasiliense in 1986, and
Expoemas (São Paulo: Entretempo, 1985). Some of Campos's most recent books, published in São Paulo
by Companhia das Letras, are O
Anticrítico (1986), critical poems and translations of Dante,
Donne, Dickinson, Stein, Duchamp, Cage, and others in an intertextual, explicitly "anti-academic"
collocation; Linguaviagem (1987), "criticism-via-translation" of Mallarmé, Valéry, Keats, and Yeats;
Mais Provençais (1988), translations from Provençal including all the songs of Arnaut Daniel;
À Margem da Margem (1989), essays and translations treating marginal works by Flaubert, Zukofsky,
Michel Butor, and Bob Brown. A third edition of
Teoria da Poesia Concreta, the collection of
manifesti written by the Campos brothers and Pignatari from 1950 to 1960, was published by Brasiliense
in 1987.

The interview was begun in São Paulo and continued by correspondence through July of 1992.
It is translated from Portuguese by Roland Greene.

RG: A first question to identify assumptions. Why does concreteness, such as usually
characterizes CP, seem to belong exclusively to lyric discourse? Does material narrative exist, either
hypothetically or actually? Or concrete drama?

AC: The problem has to do not only with CP, but with the nature of poetry itself. Paul
Valéry emphasizes the essential difference between poetry and prose: in prose, he says, the form, that is
to say the physical element, the sensible element, and the act of discourse itself are not conserved.
Normally, prose does not survive our comprehension; it is spent when it delivers its message.
And it's generally in poetry that this inextricable, molecular union is produceda union of
sound-and-sense, form-and-contentthat is demolished when we try to "translate" it into prose.

A poem cannot be summarized, Valéry insists. A melody cannot be
summarized.2 This is valid, generically, for poetry of all times, whether Sappho, Dante, or CP. But it can be said that
modern poetry, from the end of the last century, radicalized that difference, particularly with the work
of Stéphane Mallarmé. CP is a descendent of that line on its most extreme side, namely Mallarmé's
Un Coup de Dés (1897), which it rescued definitively from marginality and placed on the threshold of
a poetics for our time.

In Finnegans Wake, James Joyce coined a word, "verbivocovisual." In CP, the materiality of
the word was given new emphasis: the voco and the
visual, the sound and the graphor the significantslive here in equal condition with the
verbior the signified (to translate the
elements of the Joycean word into the terms of modern semiotics: this, at least, is how we understand the
word in our theoretical writings).

Now of course there is an "art prose," which can be distinguished from pragmatic prose,
and which, in its most experimental current, creates an area of confluence, where the criteria of
poetry and prose coexist in a boundary-situation, where the words of prose are as though ionized by
their poetic function. Such is the case of Finnegans
Wake, in many texts of Gertrude Stein, and in
the Diaries of John Cage, which are analogous to those lyric works that incorporate the language
of prose, such as certain passages in the
Galaxias of Haroldo de Campos.

It's for that reason that we install the Joyce of
Finnegans Wake in the constellation of our
influences (Mallarmé-Joyce-Pound-Cummings) and adopt that word from page 341 of
Finnegans Wake: "an admirable verbivocovisual presentment." This, however, is not the norm in prose. In sum,
the question doesn't present itself in the terms of classical rhetoric in the terms of lyric, narrative,
and drama but in the last analysis, in relation to the essential nature of the "poetic function,"
distinct from communicative discourse.

In the specific case of CP, in addition to its essential poetic nature, there are also
its agrammaticality and its brevity, which are of course opposed to syntactic articulation and
development, and which, more than any other factors, appear to make it incompatible with prose. In
CP there was, in fact, a double radicalization a radicalization of a radicalization starting from
the radical motions of the vanguards at the beginning of the century. In the 1950s, we felt this to be
a necessary regeneration of language, to purify it of the abrasions of everyday use and of its
literary abuse. CP takes to its limit the idea of the short poeman idea declared by Edgar Allan Poe in
"The Poetic Principle" (1850): "I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, 'a
long poem,' is simply a flat contradiction in terms." (The idea was never elaborated by Poe, of course,
for he also said "undue brevity degenerates into mere
epigrammatism.")3 And CP also tries to
assume, as far as possible, that critical vision of the poetic act that presupposes a distrust of the
inadequacy, and the excess, of words seen as much in the current of Mallarmé-Valéry (in the "aesthetic of
refusal," in the "resistance to the facile," carried even to the point of silence) as in the Objectivist
current (the "don'ts" of Pound).

Thus, if the nature of the poetic function would tend to make the existence of concrete prose
improbable, the radicalization of poetic elements proposed by concretismo the showing forth of
the text's materiality, and the reduction of language to a minimalist substratum assures that the
concrete experience, as such, may be realized almost exclusively in the domain of poetry. Its
extension into other areas is inhibited.

RG: We might say that most CP since the fifties inhabits the space between those two
statements of Poe's, which, taken singly, amount to little or nothing as criticism; taken together they are
the prophecy of a poetry neither "long" nor "epigrammatic," a short poem that somehow explodes
the epigram. The substance of the statements what Poe actually says about long poems, short
poems, and lyrics of "merit"is more an embarrassment than an instruction; but intuiting that
something needed to happen between those dicta, he was, I think, clearing a conceptual space for that
first "radicalization" you mention which you and your contemporaries radicalized again.

I gather you would allow that the experience of CP itself inflects or modulates Valéry's
and Jakobson's concepts of the poetic function that aside from what it holds in common with
other types of poetry, indicating that signs and referents are not identical and so forth and "promoting
the palpability of signs," CP involves something more: perhaps its metalinguistic dimension "along
with the dominant poetic function," or perhaps its deliberate focus on the (potential) materiality of the
referent as well as the sign.4 What effects might be implicated in a specifically "concrete function"?
And how might a concrete poet look back critically on that original idea of Jakobson's, which
one theorist has called "our Vulgate, the implicit fundamental article of our literary
aesthetic"?5

AC: I think that the "concrete function" you speak of is a good name for the strategy we
adopt to put that Jakobsonian poetic function in evidence, to carry it to its ultimate consequences
through the making explicit of the material elements of the poetic text and, at the same time, the critical
re-vision, with this apparatus, by collision and juxtaposition, of past and present poetries
(a metalinguistic dimension). It's difficult to establish all the effects and consequences of such a
concrete function. To the extent that it tends to identify and isolate pregnant words that enact a
textual materiality, it's implicated in the most complete rejection of the more moderate resources involved
in the usual practices of poetry, where instances of the poetic function are occluded by a sea of more
or less sentimental circumlocutions. Thus perhaps the concrete poet situates himself in the position of
a post-poet, a double poet because a critical poet, who disallows a poetry balanced on rhetorical
ingredients of emotional origin in order to emphasize the essence of poetic language. Such
a radicalization would furnish a basic strategy for advancing poetry in the direction of an iconic,
non-linear form, since (in Wendy Steiner's words) "the entire tendency of Western art to achieve
presence in the text, hence iconicity, hence the visual, has forced poetry to try to overcome the symbolic
properties of language and to stress its iconical and indexical
ones."6

RG: It's sometimes said that CP distorts or denies the temporality of lyric discourse. I'm
interested in asking what the temporality of the material poem might tell us about that of the lyric
genre at large, or vice versa.

AC:Poesia concreta: tensão de palavras-coisas no
espaço-tempo is how I tried to define it,
in 1956, in the manifesto that I published for the First National Exposition of Concrete Poetry, in
the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo: "Concrete poetry: tension of thing-words in
space-time."7 I don't believe it's possible to speak of a total abolition of temporality in CP. But it's undeniable
that, as far as it coincides with the materiality of language, breaking physically with the linear structure
of discourse, including the imagination to organize itself by juxtaposition and coordination
(parataxis) rather than by subordination (hypotaxis), and permitting a multiplicity of readings and points of
view through the exploration of graphic resources, CP interjects space into the temporality of language;
it relativizes that temporality. This phenomenon was what motivated me to speak of space-time,
although in an unorthodox way, with an obvious allusion to the conceptual universe of modern
physics. In that sense, CP simply runs parallel to the developments of contemporary music. What is
created is a perceptual ambiguity, which explodes the concepts of linearity and of temporality
conventionally tied to these two types of artistic expression.

RG: I wonder whether you would agree that space is always a crucial determinant of lyric
time, that a poem's temporality is always "relativized" by the whiteness of typographical space or the
silences of "non-events" within or around the lyric as a composition or an utterance; and that CP
goes on to make explicit what is already at work, however unobtrusively, in the genre. I think of
John Freccero's account of temporality in the most ambitious of lyric histories, Petrarch's
Rime Sparse: "In order to remove from the poems all traces of temporality and contingency, poetic instants
are strung together like pearls on an invisible strand. The lyrics themselves counterfeit a
durée by their physical proximity and so create a symbolic time, free of the threat of closure. The arrangement
of these rime sparse . . . may be thought of as an attempt to spatialize time and so to introduce a
narrative element in a way that does not threaten to exceed the carefully delimited confines of the
text."8

What would you say, in general, about the intrinsic spatiality of "non-concrete"
poetry the sense in which, as Haroldo de Campos puts it in a recent interview, "Dante or Camões may be
read as Concrete poets"?9 To understand either poems or poetry better, how might we get at this
"lyric space" critically?

AC: As I've said, CP radicalizes and makes explicit a procedure that is inherent in the nature
of poetry. Paronomasia (as Jakobson would have it) or paramorphism (as Pignatari prefers) is,
without a doubt, the principal agent of this procedure, capable of provoking the "spatialization of time"
that happens in poetry. In an essay entitled "The Illusion of Contiguity," Pignatari develops the
conceit of paronomasia or paramorphism, linking it to the notions of parataxis, spatiality, and verticality,
and referring it to rhyme as well: "Paronomasia breaks discourse (hypotaxis), turning it
spatial (parataxis), creating a non-linear syntax, an analogical-topological syntax. In a poem,
horizontal paronomasia (alliteration, colliteration) creates melody, just as vertical paronomasia is
responsible for harmony. Rhyme is vertical paronomasia at its most common. Mallarmé's
Un Coup de Dés and later concrete poems work with audiovisual, horizontal, and vertical
paronomasias."10

In its most orthodox phase, CP dispenses with the other elements of discourse and
practically toils with paronomasias alone. Look at Pignatari's poem "hambre" ("hunger"), which is
composed of only three Spanish wordshombre ("man"),
hambre ("hunger"), and
hembra ("female")substituting, for syntax, visual vectors that establish the connections between the words.
The paronomastic cohesion is so intense that the poem cannot be written in Portuguese
(homem-fome-mulher), nor translated into English (man-hunger-woman) without losing the poetic function.
But it's possible to find everywhere in poetry, if we put the secondary features aside, these same
essential elements, the poetic medullae that are concentrated in CP.

As Jakobson saw in Poe's "The Raven" the vocabular mirror "raven-never," I see in a
rubai of Fitzgerald-Khayyam, in the phrase "this life flies," the noun "life" scattering itself
anagrammatically in the verb f-l-i-e-s. Or in Dante's verse "E caddi come corpo morto cade" ("I fell down there as
a dead body falls," in Edwin Morgan's version), an iconic dramatization of the poet's fall, before
the vision of Paolo and Francesca, in Canto 5:

This spatial disposition, this concretizing, makes evident a compact structure of alliterative
disyllables which has at its center the assonant bloc "corpo morto" while it emphasizes the semantic
reference, the fall. It's this material character that makes it impossible to substitute within the line.
In Portuguese, circumstantially, an approximation is possible:
e caí como corpo morto cai, but I'm
the first of many translators to keep the sound of the line, since the others gave no importance to the
materiality of the text.12 Dante created forms heavily impressed with the concrete material of
language (including, as it happens, terza
rima).

This is not to say that all poetry should be transmuted into CP, which obviously would be
absurd. It's only to speak of seeing poetry with a new critical vision, which CP's disclosure of its
values makes propitious. It's appropriate to add that it's perhaps this same strategic conceit that
allowed the concrete poets, after the phase of didactic orthodoxy (for us, through 1958), to
reincorporate phrasal elements that had been radically rejected; the equipped eye of the post-concrete poet
can perspectivize and relativize these, and out of them re-establishes the priority of material elements
in which the poetic function essentially resides.

RG: The Philadelphia video artist Peter Rose writes of his own work that "I think of myself as
a poet, trying to find that vertical dimension to experience that serves as a reprieve from the
mercilessly forward narrative movement of time and
history."13 I don't know of a better short
statement of what lyric, any kind of lyric, does with temporality; and yet Peter Rose is a poet who
doesn't come near the printed page, who creates animated concrete poems and visual statements.
Likewise Sharon Cameron, in the one truly good book on temporality in poetry, writes that "although
lyric verbs often record temporal change, they also collapse their progressions so that movement is
not consecutive but is rather heaped or layered. This stacking up of movement, temporal forays cut
off from linear progression and treated instead as if they were vertically additive . . . , is quite
opposite to the way in which meaning 'unfolds' in novels or in the drama. The least mimetic of all art
forms, the lyric compresses rather than imitates life; it will withstand the outrage of any complexity for
the sake of being able to present sequence as if it were a
unity."14

It may be that CP, whether in print or video or any other medium, simply acts out literally
and unmistakably what all poetry does. It represents the "space" that always creeps into our
theoretical accounts of how poetry works, and therefore is a kind of critical or theoretical statement itself,
especially because it uses space to grant us a perspective on the non-spatial processes of poems: on
their temporality, voices, tropes, and so forth.

AC: Doubtless CP is part of a poetic universe. It does not create any new artistic genre, and
so it's called by the name "poetry" and claims its antecedents. It acts out what all poetry does. But
it does so in a specific, more literal way. I find that CP doesn't simply "represent space," but acts
upon it, proportioning new spatio-temporal modes of apprehension of the text by the reader. The
question has, for me, other aspects, which lead us to consider CP as a drastic recovery of the vanguard
movements from the beginning of the century, and of processes implicit in the Futurist, Cubist, and
Dada movements (collage, montage, simultaneism), linked to a new physicality in the relations
between modern man and the world of signs. Modern physics prompts these new practices, as well as
new technologies. Within this area, one would have to consider in CP the accentuation through a
spatial syntax of paratactic constructions, instead of hypotactic, which tend not merely to make
the concrete poem illustrative or demonstrative, but to give it the character of direct, disruptive action
in the body of logical structures in discourse. I've noted with satisfaction the importance that
Marjorie Perloff, in The Futurist Moment, gives to paratactic structures in the historical process of
modernism, coming to the emphasis Pignatari gives it, as the module of a spatial, non-linear
syntax.15 It's curious to observe that the word "vertical," which appears in the statements of both Peter Rose
and Sharon Cameron, also occurs in Pignatari's formulation, which I have already mentioned. We
would have to add to these characteristics the iconic, non-verbal elements incorporated by CP, which
bestow on it a special status, adjacent to or contiguous with that of the plastic arts. All this tends
to make the concrete poem more than a critical or theoretical proposition, since a metalanguage may
be present in more than one dimension.

RG: It's also argued, of course, that CP distorts or denies the orality of lyric discourse.
The North American poet and critic John Hollander, for instance, has written that "since a true
concrete poem cannot be read aloud, it has no full linguistic dimension, no existence in the ear's
kingdom."16 Haroldo de Campos has a poem, "o pavilhão da orelha" ("the outer ear" / "the pavilion of the
ear"), that not only (ironically) shows the Portuguese common usage of a phrase like Hollander's,
but as a critical poem, a kind that the Brazilian concretistas seem to specialize in argues for the aurality
of itself and poems like it.

AC: If CP were only "visual," Hollander's statement would be admissible. Such an
assertion, however, like others he makes in more than one context that CP is nothing more than "a branch
of graphic art," or alternately "a purely graphic art"betrays, in my view, an imperfect
understanding of this type of poetry as it emerged in the theory and practice of its various creators,
Eugen gomringer as much as the
Brazilians.17 In our experience, we always saw CP as
a "verbivocovisual" proposition that did not exclude "the ear's kingdom," but integrated it into a
new conception of concretude, of the materiality of poetic language. My earliest concrete
poems the cycle called Poetamenos (1953), which contains poems printed in color were directly inspired
by the klangfarbenmelodie of Anton Webern a Schoenbergian idea which, for that matter, already
suggests the dimension of sound
(klang) next to the visual dimension of color
(farbe), as part of the concept of tonal melody. And a large number of concrete poems have involved or emphasized the
auditory level, in a way unexplored even by the traditional lyric.

Of course many of our poems have been performed by ourselves and others. For that
matter, two of my volumes of poetry, Caixa
Preta (1974) and VIVA VAIA: Poesia 1949-1979
(1979), were published with a record that contains Caetano Veloso's beautiful spoken versions of "dias dias
dias" (from Poetamenos) and "o pulsar" (from the series
"Stelegramas").18 Or one might recall the
many musical works that have adapted their texts from
CP.19 All this is empirical evidence that the
general conception of CP has never implicitly excluded the aural dimension.

There are a small number of concrete poems that would privilege the visual element to the
point of implying such an exclusion: for instance, my poem "olho por olho" or the code-poems
of Pignatari, the latter a type of semiotic poetry. In the great majority of cases, however, we can
say that the emphasis on the visual element, by means of repetition or paronomasia, sustains a
parallel emphasis on the aural level. What's required, in this scheme, is a comparative rupture with the
linearity of a traditional reading: a convocation of various voices, a simultaneity or multiplicity of
readings, the introduction of the pause or silence as a structural element. As Susanne Langer observed
in Feeling and Form: "E.E. Cummings . . . gains tremendously by being read
aloud."20

RG: Rudolf Arnheim, the psychologist of art, wrote sympathetically of "the temptation to
complain about the simplicity of the typical concrete poem. It may be likened to the 'minimal art'
seen in recent years in painting and sculpture, and we may assert that although a return to the
elements can be therapeutic in certain historical situations, we must guard against granting full status to
such diminished products."21 How do you respond?

AC: I think that Arnheim himself responds, in the same essay, where he goes on to speak of
the fundamental difference between "memento" and "message." For him, CP changes the nature
and function of poetry from "message" to "memento" by "delivering it from the book," and CP "aims
at being a memento," aspires to situate itself "as a sign or placard or icon in the daily traffic of
market, pilgrimage, and recreation." I think the difference established by Arnheim between the
"message" (whose prototype would be "the letter sent by mail") and the "memento" (an inscription, a
monument, a graffito) corresponds, up to a certain point, to the distinction I have already made
between prose and poetry, radicalized to the
maximum.22 Arnheim says, at the conclusion of his study,
that "it is the double existence of words as species of pure shapes and as a non-sensory carrier of
sense that has made language the most telling symbol of modern civilized life. This symbolic role of
language is displayed in the images and verbal weaves of concrete
poetry."23

RG: And yet this "memento" status that Arnheim would wish to confer on CP seems partly
a way of circumscribing what we might call not merely its poetic function, but, adapting
Jakobson's term, its polemic-within-poetic function: I mean its potential role as a challenging kind of
social criticism, which actually takes the most recognizable verbal artifacts, such as mottos,
advertisements, and palavrões ("four-letter words"), and reconstitutes them either to lay bare the
assumptions that propel their use or to expose even broader cultural issues. This is the sense in which
Pignatari's "beba coca cola" is social criticism: a familiar, domesticated "memento" begins to spew filth at
us, like cuss words from a baby's mouth, until we see literally see that the filth was there all along.
Don't we need to resist another attempt to turn CP's iconicity into a longing for the background,
another insistance that because it imitates inscriptions and epitaphs and so forth, it must wish to
be among them always, and only, autotelic? Doesn't much of the best CP risk its "full status"
deliberately, only to gain it back with a political-social-critical vengeance?

AC: When I accept Arnheim's notion of "memento," I think more of its physical, material,
inscriptive aspect, characterized by brevity or necessity, than of the word's usual semantic
implications as a souvenir or relic. What interests me is the counterposition of the idea of a brief, lapidary
(non-linear, analogical, paratactic, iconic, spatio-temporal) poetic text against that of a logical,
temporal discourse which is what is usually meant by "message." A four-letter word inscribed on a wall
in still not a poem, but might be a "memento" in this special sense. Since in the case of CP,
the signifieds are not abandoned, but elaborated in conjunction with audio-visual values, I believe
there need be no "de-messaging" or depoliticization of the concrete text, just as a memento does not fail
to carry signification.

This is the case with "beba coca cola," an "anti-advertisement" which undoubtedly contains
a social criticism, and which can be perfectly included in the category of mementos, even as, more
appropriately, an anti-memento. But it's evident as well that there's a preconception in
Arnheim against the category of mementos or, in the final analysis, of short poems, with which I can't agree.

I believe that we can't deny artistic status to a work simply because it avails itself of a
minimal composition. This would lead us, for instance, to devalue some of the most extraordinary and
influential works of modern art in all the media, such as those of Malevich and Rodchenko,
Mondrian and Brancusi. Or the "magna opera minima" of Webern. Or even to a disowning of the long
tradition of the Greco-Latin epigram, or of the Japanese
haiku.

It's true that brevity does not always signify intensity, and that a great number of
experiences represented as concrete poems are characterized by a certain superficiality, wasting themselves
on mere graphic effects. But this is one of the risks of this type of work, a risk which the
indiscriminate proliferation of the international concrete movement made inevitable. This isn't a problem of
aesthetic definition, but simply one of quality. Likewise, there also exists a qualitative difference
between a haiku of Basho and an occasional or ornamental
haiku which, in common practice, may have degenerated into a kind of facile society pastime. So did the sonnet in the West.

On the other hand, it isn't possible to deny that CP has limitations: in fact it can be considered
a "limit case" of poetic language, which does not have to exclude other possible means of attack.
Even so, its implicit criticism of the confessional-and-conventional poetry that is everywhere to
be found is still valid today. CP, in its most consequential and sophisticated products, attempts the
most radical, coherent, and constructive re-enactment of the questioning that the vanguards,
from Mallarmé to the Futurists and the Dadaists, made concerning poetic language: a questioning
that cannot be ignored without our succumbing to the mimeticism and dilution that characterize the
second-rate eclecticism of post-modern poetry.

RG: Considering CP's treatment of such constituents of lyric as temporality, orality, and
so forth, how might one extrapolate its role as an agent within the lyric genre? Can CP be said
to mimic, criticize, or parody lyric's interests in a constructive way? Does the concrete poet have,
either by choice or ex officio, a distinct responsibility to the genre?

AC; Yes, I think that CP has tried to assume, or re-assume, the ideology of the poet-critic
that was first incarnated in an integral way in the work of Mallarmé. Sartre observed very lucidly
how Mallarmé's poetry became "poetry conscious of itself, or critical poetry," and quoted Mallarmé
himself: "The modern poet is a critic above all." For him, according to Sartre, poetry becomes
criticism and the poem, la seule
bombe.24 Valéry, on the other hand, in his
Letter on Mallarmé (1927), clarifies what I have called an "aesthetic of refusal": "Painstaking work, in literature, is manifested
and operates in terms of refusals. One might say that it is measured by the number of refusals. . . .
The rigorousness of the refusals, the number of solutions rejected, and the sort of possibilities that an
artist will not accept, reveal the nature of the scruples, the degree of consciousness attained . . .
Here is the point at which literature enters the realm of
ethics: and here it confronts the struggle between
the natural and the willed; creates its heroes and martyrs of
resistance to the facile."25

It was exactly in this sense that I spoke, in my manifesto of 1956, of the "total responsibility
[of CP] before language" (uma responsabilidade total perante a
linguagem).26 The experience of
CP, as I understood it and still understand it, arrives at minimalism and the materiality of the text by
the double intent of attaining the maximum of compositional rigor (which meant putting in
parentheses all the excess verbiage) and of inciting to function in full all the constituents of the poetic word
(as much in the graphic aspect as in sound)which meant, in turn, a revision and a liberation of the
syntactic structures imposed on poetic discourse by the categories of logic. Such a consciousness
of language would not allow the impunitive practice of the modern confessional-conventional lyric,
before which CP is situated as the "consciousness of consciousness" (Valéry), in a critical posture
of denial and negation.

RG: Is it feasible then to propose that CP is as much a species of literary theory as a type of
poetry or more so? Perhaps one of the reasons it has been so consistently devalued and
marginalized as poetry is that we're not setting it in the proper context, are asking the wrong things of it. To put
it another way: one of the properties of lyric as discourse is its concreteness, which is at least latent
in all lyric poems, and is actually exploited in a good many poems we don't think of as
specifically "concrete." Now a certain class of poems, which we recognize as concrete, deliberately
develops this property, and in doing so forfeits a number of other values we associate with lyric, but always
to make a point or open up a question: to make us see more clearly certain means by which poetic
language operates and, beyond that, certain strategies by which all poems are made. This extreme
"consciousness of consciousness" is not what one would wish poetry to do all the time, and has
its price but is finally indispensable for a culture seriously interested in a speculative understanding
of what poetry is and does.

AC: This is a way of looking at CP that seems valid to me, at least to a certain point. But
our aspiration was that poetry, after this violent radicalization, would never be the same. That CP
might come to be considered not only a type of poetry along with the other types, but a filter through
which would emerge this "consciousness of consciousness" to disallow any innocence in relation to poems.
In sum, the idea of a cultural shock, which would reinstall the Mallarmaic consciousness at the
heart of the notion of poetry. All this belongs, perhaps, to the realm of Utopia. I don't know
firsthand what happened with CP in other countries. But in Brazil, where CP really constituted a
traumatic movement, to the extent of provoking passions and hatreds that survive even now, one critic came
to refer to it as a kind of Hiroshima of the culture, and one poet asserted that CP walled in an
entire generation for twenty years. It can be said that CP is a stone on the road of literature. And that
the concrete poets are frequently regarded by other poets as terrorists and collectively, as a kind of
Big Brother because we put in danger the centrist poetries of emotive, expressive, and persuasive
discourse that continue to spread in the geléia geral
brasileira ("general jam of
Brazil").27

RG: Both you and your brother have insisted that to connect your early concrete and
polemical writing with the developmentalist outlook of mid-1950s Brazilian society especially the
administration of President Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-61)is far-fetched. Is it wrong to see the two
phenomena as coming out of a common source in the culture? Is there an imaginable relation
between CP and developmentalism?

AC: The activities that gave rise to CP began earlier in Brazil. Their antecedents are the
Modernism of '22, especially in the work of Oswald de Andrade, who had already
affirmed premonitorily, in the Cannibalist
Manifesto (1928), "somos concretistas" ("we are concretists");
and after the war, in the constructivist poetry of João Cabral de Melo Neto, "the engineer" of
modern Brazilian poetry.28 The Noigandres group was constituted in 1952, and the compositions
of poetamenos all date from 1953. Kubitschek, then little known outside his state, was governor
of Minas Gerais, and came to be a candidate for the presidency only in 1955. The connection
with developmentalism that characterized his administration were used by criticism of a sociological
orientation as an allegory, in an attempt to identify artificially the cosmopolitanism of CP with
such facts as the implantation of an automotive industry in Brazil by multinational companies: it was
a demagogic comparison that aimed at representing the protagonists of CP antipathetically, as
reactionaries or entreguistas (in the sense that development is the delivery
[entrega] of the wealth of the nation for the exploration of foreign capital), at a moment in which the demands of the
nationalists were in ascendence again. The military dictatorship that was installed in Brazil for twenty
years from 1964, creating a cultural stew that exacerbated the so-called "ideological patrols" carried out
by the left, sanctioned this negative vision of Kubitschek, in spite of his having been exiled, and in
connection with this view maintained a preconception against the poetry of his era. Today, after the
collapse of the Marxist utopia, the same Kubitschek administration is viewed with other, more
positive eyes.

It's true that there are interesting coincidences, like the construction of Brasíliaa
vanguardist capital in the conception of its architects, Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa, disciples of
Le Corbusier and that we accentuated these, in naming our manifesto of 1958 a "Pilot Plan for CP,"
in the manner of Costa's "Pilot Plan for Brasília." But Niemeyer himself, a committed
communist, didn't appreciated concrete art, preferring the figurative painting of Portinari for the alleviation
of the mauvaise conscience of his palatial and official architecture.

I really don't believe that CP can be identified with the developmentalism of that period,
which is an episodic event. I believe it was born out of a critical reflection which must be associated
with the revision and recuperation of the values of experimental art after the paralysis brought on by
the catastrophe of World War II. CP is more appropriately associated with universal phenomena such
as the redemption of the music of the Vienna School (Schoenberg, Berg, Webern) in the fifties by
the activities of composers such as Boulez and Stockhausen, the rehabilitation of the vanguards
(Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, Dada) and great marginalized figures such as Joyce, Duchamp, Ives,
Varèse,, and the emergence of ultramodernists such as Cage. In sum, what was being attempted in
different parts of the world during the fifties was a recovery of the "language of rupture" of the vanguards.
This recovery, which in Brazil produced CP, was accomplished here through a peculiar critical
synthesis, very distant from the poetic practices then in vogue as much in Hispanic America as in
the United States (the era of the Beat Generation), and derived, in some fashion, from surrealism.
It's more pertinent to emphasize that Modern Art Week in 1922 and the National Exposition of
Concrete Art of 1956 occurred in São Paulo, the major industrial center of South America, and here
economic development plays a role because on account of it there is access to information. Remember, for
instance, that on the initiative of the industrialist Cicillo Matarazzo and of the Museum of Modern
Art that he created in 1948, the first Biennial was inaugurated in São Paulo in 1951; from then on
that event would permanently catalyze Brazilian culture, putting it in contact with the most
advanced repertories of contemporary art.

RG: How do your translation projects, such as those in
O Anticrítico, reflect your poetic
program?

AC: Translation, as Pound taught, is or can be a form of criticism. I don't mean literal
translation, but that special type of translation that gains import as a recreation of the original, by
operating through an equivalence of the aesthetic and semantic values of the base-text, such as Pound
himself practices in his versions of Chinese poetry, of Propertius, and of the Provençal troubadours; or
before him, as the Rubaiyat of "Omar Fitzgerald" exemplifies. I speak, then, of "transcreation"
(as Haroldo de Campos names it) or of "art translation" (as I prefer to call
it).29 This type of translation, which has few practitioners in Brazil apart from Haroldo, Décio Pignatari, and myself, we
applied at an early moment in order to install a "tradition of invention," injecting into Brazilian
literature the new blood of radical works (many of them considered untranslatable) like those of
Joyce, Cummings, Stein, Khlebnikov, and at the same time to redeem, from a creative and not merely
didactic point of view, works of the past such as those of Arnaut Daniel, Dante, Cavalcanti,
Villon, Donne, and many others. With this "new tradition" established, and with the work of "inventors"
(in the Poundian classification) given new priority, it became possible to broaden the options and
enfold other instances of poetic creativity, always under the radical criterion of art
translation.30 Thus appeared the more recent translations of passages from Ecclesiastes (by Haroldo), from Keats,
Valéry, Block, Rilke (by me), and from Shakespeare (by Décio). But it's always a past re-viewed by
the modern eye that interests us: the syncopated concision of Emily Dickinson, the
Dinggedichte (thing-poems) of Rilke.

RG: How do you evaluate the work of the Noigandres group from today's perspective?
Among the original purposes of the movement, what remains to be done? What is the place of CP
among other poetries of the present?

AC: It's not for me to make an appreciation of our work in terms of value. I believe,
nevertheless, that CP has made a serious contribution toward the regeneration of poetic language and
the criticism of contemporary poetics. It created patterns or models of non-syntactic, para-syntactic,
and quasi-syntactic structures, showing that it is possible, through the disciplines of articulation
and minimalism, to explore new ways of poetic understanding. Moreover, CP signals the future.
Without intending, in any way, to fetishize the new powers of technology, I believe that a great part of
the future of poetry will be affected by them. Some current experiences that are now just incipient,
such as computer graphics, videotext, holography, and recording techniques, demonstrate that CP is at
the base of a viable language for these media. Having little in common with the traditional forms of
discourse, they are going to require new forms of linguistic codification that imply a stricter
involvement between the verbal and the non-verbal, which is exactly CP's field of action.

It is perhaps therein the exploration of new technological media, and in their interaction
with the spectacular arts or multidisciplinary events that we will find "what remains to be done,"
probably not by us, but by still embryonic artists who will hold over us the advantage of having
these new media at their disposal, and of having mastered them in their most complex and
advanced forms.

I myself already have had the opportunity to experiment with almost all the available vehicles
in that area, from videotext to illuminated panels, from computer graphics to holography and lasers.
Among other texts, "LUXO" and "pluvial" have been reproduced in videotext, "pulsar" and
"sos" with computer graphics, "quasar" and "cidade / city / cité" on electronic displays, "rever"
and "risco" as laser holograms, and "poema bomba" as a computer hologram.

The virtual movement of the printed word, the typogram, is giving way to the real movement
of the computerized word, the videogram, and to the typography of the electronic era. From static
to cinematic poetry, which, combined with computerized sound resources, can raise
the verbivocovisual structures preconceived by CP to their most complete materialization. In this
moment of transition, marked by regressive indefinitions of the supposed "post-" (formerly, "retro"
or "anti") modern, poetry can leave saturation and impasse for unanticipated flights into the
beyond-the-looking glass of video, and depart on a broad inter- or multi-media voyage. Moreover,
automation, which frightens humanists so much, might perhaps be humanized through poetry and,
enriching itself conceptually, attain the dignity that the mere games of electronic entertainment cannot
confer on it.

19 Some of the most popular such works are treated in Charles Perrone, "From Noigandres
to 'Milagre da Alegria': The Concrete Poets and Contemporary Brazilian Popular Music,"
Latin American Music Review 6 (1985), 58-79.

27 "The Gentle Art of Making Enemies" (1976), an anthological section of Campos's
À Margem da Margem (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1989), pp. 181-84, brings together these and other
criticisms of CP from the fifties through the seventies.